October 19, 2012

Moving the Still, courtesy of the .gifted

Animated .gifs are now (apparently) a rediscovered artform [1]. Since acquiring a tumblr account, I have run across the work of many gifted and amazing animated .gif artists. While being displaced by Flash animation for more commercial applications, animated .gifs have a quality that makes then highly amenable to artistic expression. Animated .gif are created using software such as Advanced GIF Animator or Gimp. The software is used to encode a series of sequential still pictures (in order to generate the illusion of movement) utilizing the Graphics Interchange Format (gif) [2]. One advantage of animated .gifs involves being able to dilate the playback rate by over-representing some images more than others. I have even made animated .gifs out of faux 3D images [3], which looks quite reasonable using a standard pair of 3D glasses.

Figure 1: Example #1 of slowing down animation speed in the middle of a sequence, in this case the trajectory of a ball (the AMIGA logo). If you cannot see the full animation, please reload the page.

Figure 2: Example #2 of slowing down animation speed in the middle of a sequence, in this case a semaphore embedded in two circles. If you cannot see the full animation, please reload the page.

[2] the .gif format uses LZW lossless compression, which keeps the file size small and preserves most color variation in source images (some features, however, may not be preserved).

[3] technically, this would be called an animated anaglyphs. I use the software Anaglyph Maker to properly align regular .bmp images. The depth-illusory .bmps then served as input for the animated .gif. An example can be seen here: